the wisdom of very nature

I live by it

R ! chard

first of all, let me grievously repent anegregious confusion I probably leftin my last diatribe, I said that the secondmovement of the Opus 54, no 2 sounded to me like a minuet, I had, through embarrassing inattention, confused its,however unmemorable, adagio with thatof this Opus 55, no 3, which I’d listened to in too quick succession, driven as I am by my thirst for epiphanies

the Opus 54, no 2 will do, but I’m not going back for seconds, nor to the Opus 55, no 3, though here’s where I flaunt nevertheless Haydn, not to mention Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, all the way to eventually Bruckner, Brahms, the extraordinary RichardWagner, passing through Schubert,Mendelssohn, the Strausses, fatherand son, and the unrelated Strauss,Richard, another incontrovertible giant, and I nearly left out the unforgettable Liszt, all of them forefathers of our present music

you might have noticed that these are all Germanic names, obedient to the Hapsburg empire, with Vienna as its supreme cultural capital, and it was that Austro-Hungarian dynasty thatindeed nearly single-handedly secured our Western musical traditions

a few Italians are remembered,from the 18th Century, Scarlatti maybe, Boccherini, Albinoni, but not many more

no one from France, but they were about to have a revolution, not a good time for creative types,though, incidentally, Haydn was getting Tost, to whom he was dedicating his string quartets for services rendered, to sell his stuff in very Paris

then again, Marie Antoinette, I thought, was Austrian, an even archduchess, and would’ve loved some down-home music at nearby Versailles

so there you are, there would’ve beena market

the English had Handel, of course,who was, albeit, German, getting work where he could when you consider his competition, he was too solemn and plodding by half,to my mind, for the more effervescent, admittedly Italianate, continentals, Italy having led the way earlier with especially its filigreed and unfettered operas

Haydn’s having a hard time, I think, moving from music for at court torecital hall music, music for a muchless genteel clientele, however socially aspiring, we still hear minuets, and obeisances all over the place, despite a desire to nevertheless dazzle, impress

then again, I’m not the final word, asmy mea culpa above might express, you’ll find what eventually turns your own crank, floats your own boat, as you listen

Shostakovich’s Symphony no 13, “Babi Yar”, to me is not a symphony,it’s a cantata, a text with accompanying orchestra, which is what we have here

does it matter, perhaps not that much, but it’s like going to a restaurant where you’re looking to enjoy what they’ve posted on their website but when you get there they tell you they’re out, you can only have what they’re serving

note that with voice to concentrate thecomposition, the orchestra becomesjust backdrop, no more of Shostakovich’s signature obbligatos, that gave distinction and significance to individual orchestral players’ lone, oftenpoignant, complaints

the choice of a bass to anchor the enterprise is especially, I think,unfortunate, like putting all your eggs in one basket, that basket lugubriousand forbidding – I thought of TarasBulba, or Alberich, the gnome inWagner’s “Ring”, singing – the jokes in the second movement, “Humour”,go flat, people wouldn’t laugh, but tremble rather before the domineering patriarch, oligarch, the compositionneeds the grace, the lightness, the breath, of a female figure, voice

Bach is famous for cantatas, but whatcame up for me was Carl Orff‘s incomparable “Carmina Burana“,written in, coincidentally, 1937, from medieval texts the composer had found, in Latin, describing, in lurid lyrics, the spirit of cloistered monksduring the Medieval Era

you’ll enjoy the translation of the Latin into English here, something I hadn’t experienced before, giving a whole new meaning to the word“monastery”

Shostakovich’s Symphony no. 2 doesn’t sound like a symphony – one movementonly, a chorus – but was never meant to, it had been conceived as a piece in commemorationof the OctoberRevolution, a significant event in the Communist cosmology, andcommissioned by that very polity, hence the name, “to October“

but later, the symphonic poem was included chronologically, thus no 2, in the Shostakovichian oeuvre – if you’ll excuse that pedantry, “oeuvre” being too sweet a word for me not to resist its austere territoriality – the Symphony no 2 in B majorbeing first performed in 1927

it starts a shade above inaudibly, which I often find irritating – unless, of course, it’s Wagner, or Richard Strauss, who knew what they were doing – suggesting something significant is rumbling, brewing on the musical horizon, after which we enter in a lively fashion upon a dance, full of folkloric flavour

but the harmonies are atonal, discordant, a society, however traditional, is in disorder, tonality, one of the stalwarts of Classicism, along with tempo and repetition, has been upended, distorted, the commune, the community, can, no longer unburdened, with only discordant harmonies, dance, though you can feel them trying

Ravel does something similar in his “La valse“,where, with a distortion of tempo, the world is spinning

with only a change in volume, intensity,in Shostakovich, the music becomes martial, autocratic, peremptory, nearly even frightening

I found at this point that the subtlety of the move from the conviviality of dance to the aggression delivered by a more forceful music, marches and so forth,lay in a mere alteration of the musical pulse, from seduction to, indeed, rape, in a simple change of rhythm –thus is it written in our very sensibilities

a violin obbligato then intervenes, strangely, but welcome, in a piece ofbrash, by this point, agitprop, but soon becomes as vociferous as earlier the crowd who wanted to, however awkwardly, dance

the obbligato, incidentally, instead ofan out and out solo part, as also with the piano in Shostakovich’s FirstSymphony, suggests the work of aa community, a Soviet ideal, rather than that of an individual asserting hir particular predominance, if you listen between the lines

a particularly impressive chorus eventually delivers a tribute, a hagiographic poem, to Lenin, which Shostakovich abjured, but delivered nevertheless for the money, and for the influence, reportedly, however ignominiously, for he was young, not fully formed, innocent yet

it resembles, of course, a cantata, areligious chant – see Bach, one of the evident muses of Shostakovich – but which addresses here a political system, a cute trick of contemporary secular regimes, the several –ismswithin our post-religious ideologicalsocieties

watch for it

note the spoken, or rather, prosaically proclaimed last verses of the oration,hortatory, don’t you think, or what

R ! chard

psst: incidentally, few composers are as political, though few have been under such ideological pressure, as Shostakovich

this morning, requiring especially strong
medicine to get me through my day, I put
on “Lohengrin“, Wagner’s masterpiece,
directed by the thorny and unpredictableWerner Herzog, from Bayreuth, the high
temple of that music, its very Acropolis,
1990, to lighten my load, to give me
mythic, maybe even Sisyphean,
perseverance, it didn’t disappoint

Elsa of Brabant is accused by Friedrich
of Telramund of having killed her brother,
who stood before both of them in line to
the throne, Ortrud, Friedrich’s wife, stands
silent throughout the first act looking
positively Machiavellian, Lady,
incontrovertibly, Macbeth

Elsa, summoned to plead her corner, tells
of a shining knight who appears to her in
her dreams, calls upon him to defend her
honour, he shows up at the very last
moment, on no less than a swan

he’ll only fight for her, he says, after she’s
offered him her anticipated kingdom, her
throne, her very honour and chastity, to
do with what he will, should he win for
her her cause, if she’ll pledge to never
ever ask about his origins, despite his
extraordinary entrance

she accedes, of course, though no other
knight, critically, has shown up to redeem
her

the shining knight conquers, of course,
but Ortrud, during the celebrations,
lurking ominously nearby, doesn’t give
the impression that anyone’s going to
live happily ever after, so long as
she can help it

it was the end of Act 1, I got up, made
a sandwich, I’d watch the following act
tomorrow, and so on, until the distant
end of that four-hour saga, to which
the epithet “Wagnerian”, for “epic”,
also, manifestly, belongs

wistfully I wondered about my own
knights in shining armour, who might
be my own guardian angels, entering
on fabled, maybe, even, swans,
concluded one of them had just been
Wagner, who’d turned, from heavy to
at the very least wistful, my day
around